Online Catalog Enhancements Evaluation

Give your patrons exciting new content, including recommendations, tag clouds, series and awards data, a virtual shelf browser, and the ability to write reviews, rankings, and much more.

Click here to learn more about how to evaluate LibraryThing for Libraries, ChiliFresh, and Jaunter.

Strategic Plan Dashboard

This 'dashboard' has been developed as a resource to quickly access the VLC's progress on its stated goals as part of the 2011 strategic planning process (2011-2015). Monitoring and reporting progress on long-range strategic goals included in the strategic plan is an essential component of the accountability process.

You are here

Library News

(March 20, 2019). Onit, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise workflow solutions including enterprise legal management, contract management and operational business process automation, today announced that it appointed Chris Fields as Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Co-founder Eric Smith previously held this role and will now transition to the role of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Security Officer. This new addition adds another industry veteran from the legal technology space to the company's executive management team.

(March 20, 2019). Equinox announced the successful migration of the Clymer Library to Evergreen within the Pennsylvania Integrated Library System (PaILS) SPARK Consortium. The Clymer Library joins four other Monroe County Libraries as part of SPARK.

New vacancy listings are posted weekly on Wednesday at approximately 12 noon Central Time. They appear under New This Week and under the appropriate regional listing. Postings remain on the LITA Job Site for a minimum of four weeks.

While the discoverability of traditional information resources is often the focus of library website design, there is also a need to help users find other services such as equipment, study rooms, and programs. A recent assessment of the Brigham Young University Library website identified nearly two hundred services. Many of these service descriptions were buried deep in the site, making them difficult to locate. This article will describe a web application that was developed to improve service discovery and to help ensure the accuracy and maintainability of service information on an academic library website.

As with any shared format for serializing data, Primo’s PNX records have limits on the types of data which they pass along from the source records and into the Primo tool. As a result of these limitations, PNX records do not currently have a provision for harvesting and transferring rights information about HathiTrust holdings that the Kansas State University (KSU) Library system indexes through Primo. This created a problem, since Primo was defaulting to indicate that all HathiTrust materials were available to KSU Libraries (K-State Libraries) patrons, when only a limited portion of them actually were. This disconnect was infuriating some library users, and creating difficulties for the public services librarians. There was a library-wide discussion about removing HathiTrust holdings from Primo altogether, but it was decided that such a solution was an overreaction. As a consequence, the library IT department began a crash program to attempt to find a solution to the problem. The result was an application called hathiGenius.

This article describes a bibliographic mapping project recently undertaken at the Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW). The MARC Advisory Committee recently approved an update to MARC that enables the use of dereferenceable Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in MARC subfield $0. The ISAW Library has taken advantage of MARC’s new openness to URIs, using identifiers from the linked data gazetteer Pleiades in MARC records and using this metadata to create maps representing our library’s holdings. By populating our MARC records with URIs from Pleiades, an online, linked open data (LOD) gazetteer of the ancient world, we are able to create maps of the geographic metadata in our library’s catalog. This article describes the background, procedures, and potential future directions for this collection-mapping project.

Information System (IS)/IT project success is a growing interest in management due to its high impact on organizational change and effectiveness. Libraries have been adopting integrated library systems (ILS) to manage services and resources for years. It is essential for librarians to understand the mechanism of IS project management in order to successfully bring technology innovation to the organization. This study develops a theoretical model of measuring IS project success and tests it in an ILS merger project through a software-assisted qualitative content analysis. The model addresses project success through three constructs: (1) project management process, (2) project outcomes, and (3) contextual factors. The results indicate project management success alone cannot guarantee project success; project outputs and contextual factors also influence success through the leadership of the project manager throughout the lifecycle. The study not only confirms the proposed model in a post-project evaluation, but also signifies that project assessment can reinforce organizational learning, increase the chance of achieving success, and maximize overall returns for an organization. The qualitative content analysis with NVivo 11 has provided a new research method for project managers to self-assess an IS/IT project success systematically and learn from their experiences throughout the project lifecycle.

The main purpose of the article is to divide the web preservation process into small explicable stages and design a step-by-step web preservation process that leads to creating a well-organized web archive. A number of research articles were studied. The proposed comprehensive web preservation process describes and combines strengths of different techniques observed during the study. For each web preservation step, different approaches and possible implementation techniques have been identified that can be adopted in digital archiving. The potential value of the proposed model is to guide the archivist, related personnel, and organizations to effectively preserve their intellectual digital contents for future use. The model can help to initiate a web preservation process and create a well-organized web archive to efficiently manage the archived web contents. A section briefly describes the implementation of the proposed approach in a digital news stories preservation framework for archiving news published online from different sources.

The rising cost of textbooks for students has been highlighted as a major concern in higher education, particularly in the US and Canada. Less has been reported, however, about the costs of textbooks outside of North America, including in Europe. We address this gap in the knowledge through a case study of one Irish higher education institution, focusing on the cost, accessibility, and licensing of textbooks. We report here on an investigation of textbook prices drawing from an official college course catalog containing several thousand books. We detail how we sought to determine metadata of these books including: the formats they are available in, whether they are in the public domain, and the retail prices. We explain how we used methods to automatically determine textbook costs using Google Books API and make our code and dataset publicly available.

(March 19, 2019). Emerald Publishing will launch a completely new Emerald Insight digital research platform. Developed in collaboration with twelve leading international universities, it is designed to make social sciences research easy and enjoyable to discover. Emerald Insight  the home of over 300 journals, 3,000 books, 1,700 case studies and a growing collection of open access content  has been entirely reimagined and rebuilt. The forward-thinking design offers an engaging and rewarding user experience; showcasing researchers' work, paving the way for rapid evolution and meeting future research needs.

(March 19, 2019). Rakuten OverDrive, the leading digital reading platform worldwide, is partnering with the German digital distribution service provider Libreka to bring its ebook and digital audiobook catalog to public libraries in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Libreka is one of the largest distributors in Germany representing over 40,000 publishers and more than 1,000 domestic and international trading partners.

This workshop for female-identifying individuals will start with looking at imposter syndrome and then allow participants to propose unconference topics such as salary negotiation, creating inclusive job postings, and becoming leaders in the technology field.

Work smarter, collaborate faster, and share code or other files with the library community using the popular version control system Git. Featuring a mix of fundamentals and hands-on exercises, participants learn the basics of Git, how to use key commands, and how to use GitHub to their advantage.

Participants will use hands-on activities to learn how to incorporate different metadata management tools into their workflows, discuss example use cases for each tool, and have the opportunity to collaborate on problem-solving metadata workflow issues.

(March 19, 2019). The Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Digital Science announce an agreement that will see Dimensions rolled out across the institution. Dimensions is a powerful, linked-research data platform that provides access to more than 140 million contextualized and integrated research outputs and enables researchers at the university to discover their connections for the most complete view of the research landscape.

(March 19, 2019). Digital Science announces an agreement with the Kazan Federal University that will provide Dimensions access to users across the institution. Dimensions is a novel research insights platform designed to break down barriers to access and discovery. With access to Dimensions, researchers at Kazan Federal University can now seamlessly explore the connections between over 141 million grants, publications, clinical trials, patents and policy documents.

(March 19, 2019). Softlink Information Centres, a leading supplier of library and research management systems is pleased to announce the release this week of Liberty v5 Build 8.031. The version includes a number of much anticipated features and enhancements.

(March 18, 2019). RedLink announced that BMJ is the latest publisher to offer Remarq, a tool for the research and education communities offering collaboration, annotation, commenting, article sharing, and editorial tools, all on the publisher's site and utilizing the version of record. Remarq launched earlier this week on BMJ Open, an open access journal dedicated to publishing medical research from all disciplines and therapeutic areas.

(March 18, 2019). The Urban Libraries Council convened leaders from 11 public library systems in Chicago on March 13-14 to kick off pilot programs designed to test new approaches to engaging low-income middle school youth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. These programs are extensions of ULC's Partners for Middle School STEM initiative  a two-year project focused on building multi-sector community partnerships to increase STEM learning opportunities for underserved middle school students.

(March 16, 2019). Turnitin announced two executive appointments to strengthen Turnitin's leadership team as it widens its product offering and expands globally. Marc Daubach, formerly corporate vice president and general manager of Europe for Ex Libris Group, is joining Turnitin as corporate vice president of international. Ron Park, an experienced Silicon Valley technology executive, will serve as chief technology officer and senior vice president of engineering and operations.

(March 13, 2019). Turnitin, a leading provider of feedback, grading, and plagiarism checking solutions, announced today the general availability of Authorship Investigate, the first solution that supports higher education administrators in addressing contract cheating. Authorship Investigate uses forensic linguistic analysis and Natural Language Processing to help investigators efficiently compare differences in written work and gather the evidence needed to investigate potential cases of contract cheating.